The Sapporo Outbreak (24 page)

Dodgson smiled broadly, let out a loud yawn, pushed his bare feet against the wooden floor and let his high-back chair trundle a couple of feet from the desk. He stood up, stretched and tentatively rubbed his red eyes. Exhausted but elated, the software engineer and self-proclaimed privacy freedom fighter felt a surge of pure joy pulse through his body.
 

He walked past the large desk, stood in front of the apartment's large bay windows and peered into the murky winter's night. He watched as a gaggle of drunk twenty-something students tumbled from the bar's entrance and swaggered and slurred their way into the night. Although it had been only a few years since Dodgson had been a student, he felt no connection with these people. He watched, fascinated and disgusted as the students stumbled through the snow. Despite being surrounded by friends, no one was talking. Instead, they were staring down at their phones as they stumbled and slid over the icy sidewalk, desperate for a social media fix.

Dodgson shook his head slowly.
 

The world was addicted to connection. Age, location, lifestyle - it didn't matter. People were broadcasting every aspect of their lives to the world. Where they were. What they were doing, with whom. Dodgson was baffled by the casual disregard people had for their own privacy. He had seen what his clients - marketers, corporations and government agencies - did with this information. Dodgson understood how easy it was to take every tiny piece of personal trivia, every post, tweet, blog, email, picture, video and text - and quickly build a complete picture of the person. He had made a lot of money very quickly by helping the vigilant protect their data - and almost always he was helping the very organisations that were the worst offenders.

Corporations and governments were systematically stealing everything that identified the individual. To Dodgson, it was theft on an unimaginable scale.
 

And no one was doing anything to stop it.

Until tonight.
 

Right here - in his downtown Seattle apartment using state of the art security systems he had designed for those corporate and government thieves - Dodgson had sucker-punched the very worst identity vulture. He turned his back on the winter scene and walked back to his desk, surveying the frenetic activity on the large monitors. Dodgson watched as the infected code he had designed and crafted over months with his fellow ANONet hackers enveloped the WhiteStar security systems, blinding it to all his work. He watched as the rogue code snaked its way through the holes Dodgson had designed in to the system and into the iSight game. He watched the brilliant, elegant software as it exploded into thousands and thousands of replicas, then spread itself over the iSight system. The viral software burrowed and buried itself deeper and deeper into the iSight system and - seconds later - Dodgson finally saw what he'd worked for, planned for, his whole life.
 

The WhiteStar security system collapsed completely.
 

The new iSight 3 game, scheduled for imminent release and destined to make greedy shareholders unimaginably wealthy, was now being copied out of the WhiteStar servers and spread over tens of thousands of servers around the world. Over twenty million iSight 2 players had already silently switched over to the 'released' iSight3 version. Free to use, and free of the snooping, privacy-invading code. As soon as a copy was complete, others were spawned. Dodgson was beside himself with joy. The attack had worked perfectly - and much, much faster than he'd ever imagined. 'Must be those new quantum servers' he muttered to himself while he stared, enthralled, as wave after wave of users were automatically switched over to the free, unconstrained iSight 3 game. To those already in the game it would feel like the shackles had been lifted, and the curtain had been swept aside to reveal a dramatic new hyper-real world. A world with no constraints, one in which players were no longer monitored, controlled and manipulated for profit.
 

Pre-scheduled announcements from ANONet were now triggered, publishing details of the release on social networks, blogs and sites around the world. Dodgson watched as first thousands, then tens of thousands joined the iSight 3 game for the first time.
 

Dodgson checked his watch. 10:10pm. He glanced at the monitors and made a quick calculation. At this rate iSight 3 - stripped of all the insidious profiling and identify theft - would be freely available to over one billion players by morning.

He had done it. This was a hammer blow to all those who'd trampled on individual privacy and online freedom. As the bar music drifted up through the black of winter, Dodgson had never felt more alive.
 

CHAPTER FOUR

Contamination

3pm Thursday, Sapporo, Japan

Santos looked up at Skinner, who discretely tapped twice underneath his right eye with his index finger. Santos flicked a quick glance at Sakura, Hill and Harper as they strode into the corridor leading into the Game Immersion lab. She nodded silently to Skinner, then quickly opened her right eyelid, pressed her finger onto the iSight 3 lens, lifted it out and tucked it into the back pocket of her white jeans. She repeated the process with her left eye, and immediately felt Skinner's firm grip on her arm as he guided her toward Sakura and their two colleagues.
 

As she stumbled forward, blinking rapidly to ease the sharp stinging sensation in her eyes, she felt a lurching sense of discomfort, a nausea bubbling in the pit of her stomach. She felt disoriented, unnerved. As the pain in her eyes quickly subsided, Santos realised with a start that she
missed
the iSight lenses. She felt exposed, naked and unsafe without them.

Fixing his eyes on Sakura and the two men ahead, Skinner whispered, "How are you feeling?"

Santos grimaced. "Terrible. I can't decide whether to throw up or pass out."

"Yeah - I know what you mean. I felt the same thing. It passed in a few minutes, but I hate to think how it would feel if I'd been wearing the lenses for a few days."

Santos glanced up at Skinner. "It's scary. Right now, what I really want to do more than anything is put the lenses back in. I don't feel safe without them."

"I know what you mean Eva. I'm still struggling without them. For a start, this building doesn't make any
sense
without them. I miss the signs, the colours, the fake artwork - even those endless little bubbles floating on top of things. Now everything seems so ... bland."

Santos looked at Skinner. "Ben. What did Steve say? And why did we have to remove these lenses?"

Before Skinner could reply, Sakura's voice, polite yet with a noticeable edge, interrupted.

"Excuse me Doctor Santos, Professor Skinner. Would you mind coming in a little closer? We are about to enter the immersion labs. It would be a pity if you were to miss any of this."

#

Skinner and Santos muttered apologies as they hustled to a stop behind Harper and Hill. Sakura fixed a curious gaze on the pair before addressing the four consultants.

"I'm sure you are all quite exhausted by now, and will be pleased to hear that this will be our last stop on today's tour of the facility."

A familiar pause and polite smile followed, before Sakura continued.

"Here you will see iSight3 players - some paid and others volunteering - immerse themselves in different characters, enter different regions of the virtual world and play out different scenes. Everything they do, both in the rooms and in the virtual world, is monitored by Dr Tait and his team in the fifth floor NOC."

As she talked Sakura led the group further down the central corridor dividing the east and west of the building, slowing to a stop between two very large rooms. Through his iSight 3 glasses, Hill could see the room to his left coloured a bright green, and the words 'iSight3 - Conflict' splashed over the door. To his right, 'iSight 3 - Competition'.
 
The corridor stretched ahead of them past other rooms before coming to a solid wall. Behind them, the corridor stretched back in the distance, eventually leading out to the lounge area. Other corridors stretched east and west.
 

They were standing in the dead centre of the research lab.

Santos tuned out Sakura as she began another corporate sales pitch on the quality of the research conducted. She was fascinated by what she could see through the large tinted window, which she assumed to be some sort of two-way mirror. Around twenty predominantly Japanese players - old and young, male and female, gathered in large and small groups. Some sat around thick sofas circles, others stood and a few walked briskly around the room as if out on a morning hike. All of them were moving in a slightly unnatural, exaggerated manner. Most were talking animatedly - some to other players while many seemed to be deep in conversation with thin air. As Santos watched closely, it seemed clear from the body language of the players that many were engaged - or at least believed they were - in an argument of some sort.
 
Most seemed light hearted and interspersed with smiles and nudges while a few others seemed a little more pointed. One or two - interestingly to Santos, both talking to what she presumed were 'virtual players' - appeared to be escalating into more serious disagreements.
 

It looked bizarre. Almost comical. It was like watching actors rehearse their lines before opening night. And yet something about the scene disturbed Santos.

She narrowed her focus to the two players 'arguing' with an invisible friend. They seemed agitated, almost angry, arms flailing in the air to emphasise a point. In just the few seconds that she'd been watching, it seemed to escalate. Suddenly, several other players sprang to agitated life, shouting obscenities loudly enough that she could hear them through the thick glass window.

Two greying middle-aged men were shouting aggressively at each other. The slightly shorter, podgier of the two suddenly swung at the other, a wild and slow haymaker that missed by a distance. Watching this scene unfold, Santos briefly wondered if this was another one of Tanaka's stunts. It would be just like Tanaka to hire a few actors to stage a scene that made light of the board's safety concerns. She quickly dismissed the thought as the fight escalated. Two well-dressed middle aged men brawling - it seemed ... surreal.

To Santos, it looked like a situation rapidly spiralling out of control. She could feel Ben Skinner move next to her, staring in at the same scene of anger unfolding in front of them.

Skinner watched as the men threw themselves at each other, falling to the floor with a crunch. The shorter, plumper man looked hurt as the other continued to flail away.

Skinner couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On."

"Ben, Tanaka's wrong. He hasn't created an extension of the 'real' world online. He's created something very different - a new world. And who knows how people perfectly evolved for this world will react in this odd new one."
 

"Eva - that's what I wanted to tell you. That 'problem' Clark called about?"

Santos nodded. "Go on."

Skinner glanced over his shoulder, lowered his voice to a whisper.

"He's not sure yet, you know how careful Steve is, but he suspects WhiteStar are tied up in the attack in Palo Alto."

Santos stared incredulously at Skinner, "WhiteStar! How?"

"He say's he's found similar attacks, nasty ones that fit the Palo Alto profile, cropping up in different parts of the world. All in the last few weeks. All within a few miles of a WhiteStar centre. And - Clark is trying to confirm this - all the perpetrators were iSight 3 testers."

"Holy shit!"

"I know, it's hard to believe ..."

Santos interrupted, talking in a low, urgent whisper.

"Actually Ben, it's not too hard at all. The game's so damn realistic that I wouldn't be surprised if it induced some sort of psychosis with some of the more fervent or suggestible players. I mean - look at what's happening in there!"

Skinner watched as the initial look of surprise on Santos' face quickly morphed into a professional detachment. She continued, her tone now calm, as if discussing a challenging patient diagnosis with a colleague. "I don't get what triggers such extreme violence. Could be some sort of paranoid schizophrenia. But
multiple
times? And within
groups
? And why now? What's changed in the last few weeks to make this all happen?"

Santos turned back to the scene unfolding in the room for a few seconds, before swivelling back to Skinner.

"So what's the deal with taking out our lenses? How does that tie in? Are you worried we'd get 'infected' in some way?"

Before Skinner could answer, an enormous crash echoed down the corridor, stopping him in his tracks.

#

The crash resonated up through the corridor catching everyone's attention. Sakura's head pivoted instantly toward the source of the sound. She paused for a few seconds and then slowly returned her gaze to the group.
 

"I'm sorry about that. We have maintenance teams working around the clock ahead of the game's launch next week. Sounds like something expensive's been broken."

The beautiful young Japanese woman smiled as she spoke, but to Santos it seemed forced. Unnatural. The typically unflappable Sakura suddenly seemed nervous. Uneasy somehow. Santos shot a quizzical glance at Skinner, who raised an eyebrow.

Sakura continued.

"For the past twelve weeks this floor has been dedicated entirely to final testing of iSight 3. As I speak, every one of the research rooms on this floor and the second floor below us are filled with players immersed in different levels of the game. That's over four hundred players testing sections of the game. And the same thing is happening in our Berlin, London, New York, Sydney and Palo Alto centres."

More crashes echoed up through the long corridors, and this time it seemed to come from all directions. Sakura's calm facade dissolved, and a look of real alarm spread over her face as she spun around.